2021-06-23

Cool

Hugo Administration Team Resigns – Locus Online

“The Hugo Awards exist to celebrate and honor all of the creators chosen by the Worldcon membership. We should have considered those creators’ needs and feelings through our policies and the messaging we used.”

It is clear that we have taken the process as far as we can, and that our input is no longer needed by the convention leadership. We are therefore resigning from DisCon III with immediate effect.
Improvised Objects and Solutions, from Redneck Engineering - Core77
Monitor your Internet with a Raspberry Pi | Jeff Geerling

Now I know exactly how much my ISP is fleecing me for Internet. In Spectrum's case, it looks like they're only giving me about 3/4ths of what I pay for. I wish I could just pay them $110 a month instead of $150, but if I did that, they'd cancel my service!

I made 56874 calls to explore the telephone network. Here's what I found

To avoid listening to all recordings myself, used Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to transcribe the recordings, and then used the transcriptions to aside the call recordings that have the same message. This reduced the number of calls to listen manually to around 300, a bearable number.
This Tech Entrepreneur Scored With Home Media Streaming; Now He’s Miniaturizing the Chocolate Factory - IEEE Spectrum

Saal says CocoTerra will ship products early in 2022; the company is now taking preorders at $799 and intends the initial sticker price to be $1199.
Archaeologists recreated three common kinds of Paleolithic cave lighting | Ars Technica
Police Helo Crew: Mysterious Craft They Chased Was Not Like Any Other Drone
Hubble telescope remains in safe mode as NASA tries to restart crashed computer

US seizes 33 Iranian state-run media sites accused of election disinformation

On Tuesday, the US government said it seized 33 websites run by a branch of the Iranian government that spread disinformation in the US before the 2020 presidential election. The US also seized three websites that it said were operated by an Iraqi terrorist organization.

"The Iranian regime has targeted the United States' electoral process with brazen attempts to sow discord among the voting populace by spreading disinformation online and executing malign influence operations aimed at misleading US voters," the October 2020 announcement said. "Components of the Government of Iran, disguised as news organizations or media outlets, have targeted the United States in order to subvert US democratic processes."
Journalists Hit New Low by Betraying Source | RealClearPolitics